Bad

Overview

When you are pregnant for ten years and give birth to a teenager.

Our Ivacy VPN review proudly presents to you “The most advanced VPN” as claimed by PMG Pte. Ltd. based in Singapore, who is the stepfather of this teenager. The real father was of Russian origins. Not much is known about either father due to some mysterious secrecy and privacy that surround the leadership of this company.

It is quite strange that after having been around for more than 11 years, Ivacy VPN has only managed to lure around 200 thousand users into its online privacy circle. If you compare this number to the 150+ million users Hola VPN and the 44 million users ZenMate can boast, you can figure out how profitable it is to have a free VPN version or how to market your product properly.

This VPN service has 450+ servers in 100+ locations in 50+ countries out of which around 30 are virtual servers. Unfortunately, though it’s based in an exotic country, Singapore, (along with South Korea) it is a country that is known to be a partner to the Five Eyes global surveillance. The Five Eyes agreement gained focus of privacy-conscious people when Edward Snowden leaked those infamous top-secret NSA documents back in 2013.

That said, we also need to add right away that our Ivacy VPN review found that this service takes zero-log policy seriously, which is a big plus even if the company is based in a surveillance-friendly environment.

With this service, you can have proper speeds for all you may need, including watching the FIFA World Cup with an exclusive offer, but connections may drop after a few hours, which can be annoying. Remember to turn the kill switch on, though, to stop possible leaks.

All in all, this is a great value VPN for a generous price, but definitely not a perfect one.

Security & Privacy: Is Ivacy VPN safe to use?

First off, you should know that the so-called zero-log or no logs policy is becoming somewhat corny. By this, we mean that lots of VPN providers use this policy as a marketing weapon and wallpaper their websites with eye-catching claims of maximum anonymity by no logging at all. And then, you open up the Privacy Policy and find contradictory paragraphs about what is and is not logged about you and your traffic.

So, is Ivacy VPN safe to use? If we want to find out, we need to know more than just the simple claim of having a zero-logs policy.

You can clearly see that there is no usage and no connection logs, either. This is great news. However, if you go on reading the policy – and you should always read it word by word –, you can see that your name, email address, and the payment method you used to purchase a plan are also collected. This Privacy Policy quite clearly explains how the collected information may be used. Fortunately, this legal document does a good job at reassuring you that your identity and physical location can never be linked to any VPN traffic.

So, even if the local or global authorities demand logs, Ivacy VPN would probably shrug its shoulders and wish them good luck. This is quite comforting, to be frank.

This VPN offers all the best and most popular protocols, including OpenVPN, PPTP, SSTP, L2TP, and IKEv2. Being the father of the popular Split Tunneling feature, Ivacy cannot leave this great security feature from its palette, either. With Split Tunneling, you can decide what traffic is sent through your ISP (Internet Service Provider) and what traffic is protected by your VPN.

Furthermore, you also have an internet kill switch as well as IPv6 leak protection, which is off by default.

All in all, we can say that despite the questionable and mysterious background, Ivacy VPN offers good online security and privacy features. It also seems that they have a true zero-log policy, but we still don’t consider a Five Eyes-friendly country the best basis for a VPN operation.

We do miss the TOR (The Onion Router) browser compatibility, which can provide an extra layer of security and privacy when used with a VPN like NordVPN. But, it isn’t a feature that all premium VPN services offer anyway.

Speed: The average of Greased Lightning and Despacito

You definitely won’t be fined by the internet police for speeding on the virtual highway, but it’s also for sure that Luis Fonsi wasn’t thinking of Ivacy VPN when he wrote his giga music hit, Despacito.

Jokes aside, we can tell you that this service provides solid download and upload speeds (topping around 50Mbps on a 70Mbps baseline), which can be seamlessly used for streaming any of the supported media streaming services, including Netflix US, BBC iPlayer, Kodi, and Amazon Prime. Please note that you may experience totally different speeds due to your hardware, your baseline speeds, your distance from the chosen VPN server, and so on.

Ivacy VPN has 450+ servers in 50+ countries, which is not bad a coverage, but we’ve seen better, too. While you can find lots of complaints on the web about horrific speeds and annoying connection drops, these may be things of the past. It seems that this VPN provider has gone through some serious changes in the past year, so reading reviews and comments from 2017 may not give you the right angle on this service.

If speed is of great importance to you, we suggest that you check out our best VPN picks before making a decision.

How to download and install it

Ivacy VPN offers a great range of clients covering all the major platforms and more. You can use this VPN with Windows, Mac OS, iOS, Android, Chrome, and Firefox. But, you can also configure it for other supported platforms like Linux, Blackberry, Smart TV, Openelec, Routers, Consoles (Xbox), and Kodi with the detailed help you can find on the website.

You can either mouse over the Our Apps menu at the top and select your desired client, or click the orange Download Apps Now button to end up on the Downloads page, where you can choose a platform. Another way for you to get on with your download is to scroll down the page and find your wanted client’s link in the Products section of the footer.

Once you have your installer, the installation process won’t take a minute. Very simple indeed.

The clients look quite nice and they are all very easy to use.

How to use Ivacy VPN

When you launch this app and log in with your account, you find yourself on the Smart Connect screen, which is the first tab in the left-hand side menu. In the case of the desktop client, you can choose a location by either selecting the Country or the City radio button and then, click the white button that says Automatic by default. The drop-down box will contain the respective list of available servers.

To use the same option in the mobile client, you need to choose the Locations tab at the top, and then, select the desired sub-tab (Countries or Cities):

On the main screen, you can also see a large Power button (all clients). If you click it, you can automatically connect to the closest optimal server. At the bottom, you find your current location.

Once you connect to an Ivacy VPN server, you can see your new IP address and location, the time you have spent on this server as well as some basic information about your connection (no logs, encryption enabled, hidden IP, and secure browsing).

The desktop app has the following menu on the left:

Smart Connect

Secure Download

Streaming

Unblocking

Dedicated IP

My Account

Settings

Help

You have very similar tabs on the mobile apps as well, but they may be grouped differently. For instance, you can choose an optimized server for streaming, secure downloading, or unblocking, if you click the Purpose tab, and then, choose from these options. For the rest of the settings, you need to click the Gear icon in the mobile app.

The Settings menu offers some security customization in case of all clients; however, there can be minor differences regarding the availability and the naming of certain options. The desktop app has two sub-tabs.

On the General sub-tab, you can change general settings like whether you want your VPN app to start up automatically with your system, redial automatically if the connection drops, or protect you from IPv6 leaks.

On the Connection sub-tab, you can choose your VPN protocol, turn on or off the kill switch as well as split tunneling.

Basically, these Ivacy VPN clients are quite straightforward to use. This service is definitely ideal for a beginner or intermediate VPN user. More advanced users may want more freedom and more options for customization.

Ivacy VPN for Netflix

Yes, it’s possible that you can use Ivacy VPN for Netflix US and many more media streaming services, including ESPN US, Spotify, Hulu, Sky, Amazon Prime, and BBC iPlayer since this is what this provider claims on its website. However, experience and reports suggest that you may have some issues with this.

The good news is that you can always use the live chat support to help you with accessing Netflix US or any other services. They will probably provide you with a server to connect to, which will actually work.

Of course, Netflix and other providers are also cracking down on spoofed IPs and VPN services; therefore, there’s no permanent solution. Yet, you may find other, more reliable premium VPN providers like NordVPN, ExpressVPN, or PrivateVPN, which are among our best VPN for Netflix picks.

Ivacy VPN for Kodi

First off, no, Kodi is not illegal; before you may start wondering. Kodi is an open-source media streamer. As long as you use it to access official channels, you are a good citizen in the eye of the law.

You should be able to use Ivacy VPN for Kodi; at least, this is what Ivacy promotes on its website. You can find detailed installation guides on how to install Kodi on different devices and how to install VPN with Kodi.

You may have issues with accessing certain services, this addon is in no way perfect. But, we do appreciate the effort. Nevertheless, you may want to check out our best VPN for Kodi post to have a clearer picture.

Ivacy VPN for Torrenting

Good news for BitTorrent users: Yes, you can use Ivacy VPN for torrenting. As a matter of fact, this service has optimized P2P servers except for servers in the UK, Mexico, India, Switzerland, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, France, Brazil, Egypt, Hong Kong, Italy, South Africa, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea, China, Czech, Finland, Jordan and Kuwait. Make sure you always choose the right server for your intention.

We also must mention that you can’t forget to set up your qBittorrent, uTorrent, or Vuze client properly to bind it to the VPN connection. If you fail to configure your torrent app properly, it will use your default internet connection via your ISP, which could have catastrophic consequences.

Live chat support

Another plus for Ivacy VPN is that they provide quite a good quality and fast live chat support. You can access the live chat window through the official website if you click the hovering Chat button or Chat now window header in the bottom right corner of your screen.

The response is pretty fast, though it may not be instant. The help this live chat support provides is quite useful. Even though it is not a robot you are chatting with, you may get sort of automated replies sometimes or links to related pages, such as the Privacy Policy. On the whole, we are satisfied with the live chat support we have experienced while writing this Ivacy VPN review.

You can also find a good knowledge base for your questions if you visit the Support page on the website.

The VPN clients also offer help. You can, for example, read some FAQs, submit a support ticket, or send feedback to the support team if you choose the Help menu.

While this service does provide a useful and good customer support, our favorite picks for the best live chat support are still ExpressVPN and NordVPN.

Pricing: One of the best on the market

Without a doubt, Ivacy VPN offers one of the best and cheapest prices on the market right now. Of course, it is hard to keep up with all the VPN pricing changes, but we do our best to update our reviews to show you the freshest possible prices.

This VPN service has no free version. But, it’s prices are totally affordable when compared to other competitors. Here’s what you have to pay to get Ivacy on your device:

1-month plan: $8.95 per month

1-year plan: $3.00 per month

2-year plan: $1.99 per month

5-year plan: $1 per month (limited time offer lifetime package)

You also have a 30-day money-back guarantee (7 days for the 1-month plan), but you need to be aware of the conditions. If you want to make sure you to get all your money back, you should read the Refund Policy very carefully.

Ivacy VPN offers a great variety of payment methods apart from the usual credit cards and PayPal. You can choose to pay with Bitcoin, Blackcoin, Dash, Etherum, and Paymentwall, to mention a few alternatives.

When you are purchasing your chosen plan, you can also select optional add-ons, such as a NAT firewall for $1.00 per month and a Dedicated IP for $1.99 per month.

This VPN service surely wants to be up-to-date. They even dedicated a whole main menu to the FIFA World Cup to offer users an exclusive offer.

Would you like to have a chance to try this VPN for free? Well, you can’t. However, for $2.50 you can actually have a 3-day trial, but this is not really advertised on the website. You need to contact the live chat support to get the link and information.

Ivacy VPN by Reddit

Although you will find dozens of threads and comments on Reddit regarding Ivacy VPN, most of these are too old to be of interest or help. The majority of these reddit.com threads are lifetime subscription and other Ivacy promotions anyway.

We only found one thread interesting, which is about using Ivacy VPN with qBittorrent. The user in question experienced connection drops after a certain period of time. This thread is already one year old, so it may not be an issue anymore. However, we did find many users reporting similar issues regarding connection drops after a few hours. Thank god, there is a kill switch in the clients. Remember to switch it on for the best level of security and privacy.

Bottom line: Puberty with some pimples

Ivacy VPN certainly has good security and privacy features, including split tunneling, IPv6 leak protection, and the kill switch as well. It has all the basic features to make sure that your anonymity is protected at all times. This VPN service is also serious about its zero-log policy and keeps no logs of your internet usage and connections, either. In other words, no one can link you to any traffic or find out your physical location. Sounds secure enough?

This VPN has various speeds, but in general, you can use it for anything you please, including torrenting, accessing geo-restricted websites, streaming videos. As for Netflix US, Kodi, and other media streaming services, it is possible that you will have issues accessing them, but you can always turn to the live chat support for help, and it will be likely to sort out your issue. While you cannot really call this ideal, still better than not supporting any of the streaming sites.

Because of the generous pricing, it may be a good choice for beginners or even intermediate VPN users. If you are looking for something even more secure for your needs, you should read our best VPN services post for more insight.

How about learning from other VPN users?

Do you have any related questions? Have you ever tried to use Ivacy VPN or any other VPN apps before? What are your impressions?